Origina scores "ICT Excellence" Hat-Trick!Friday 22nd May 2009
At a special awards ceremony held last night at the Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire, Origina were coveted with the very special ICT Excellence award for "Green IT Initiative of the Year 2009". This ICT Excellence award builds on the two ICT Excellence awards already won for "Project of the Year" in 2007 and 2008.
Pictured: Award presented by Chas Moloney, Director of Marketing, Ricoh (Left). Award accepted by Rowan O'Donoghue, Director of Innovation & Development (Centre), and Tomas O’Leary, Managing Director (Right) of Origina.
This latest ICT Excellence award comes as Origina, an Irish-owned IT consultancy firm with offices in Ireland & The UK have developed and launched a number of highly innovative ‘Green Data’ storage solutions through their alliance with Compellent Technologies. This is the latest in a number of ‘Green’ initiatives brought to market by the company’s Innovation & Development team in the past few years. Origina’s Innovation & Development team has had some notable success with their new products and services including being short listed for ‘Innovator of the Year’ at this year’s Small Firms Association Small Business Awards. This ‘Green Data’ solution has been developed to address the issue of ever increasing costs in managing an organisation’s storage infrastructure. These costs are made up of things like Data Centre space, Power and Cooling, acquisition costs & cost of storage administrators. Our solution for University College Hospital Galway won the coveted ‘Green IT Initiative of the Year’ accolade due to the pioneering initiative shown by Origina as a company by introducing a new and extremely eco-friendly storage solution into the Irish storage market, while at the same time delivering the best total cost of ownership in the business. In the last number of years Irish organisations have embraced the concepts surrounding virtualisation and are realising significant savings in server acquisition & running costs. Origina are now coupling this type of saving to the other key ingredient in a virtualised environment; The Storage. Origina's "Green" Storage SolutionsOrigina’s ‘Green’ storage solutions guarantee to use at least 40% less disk than the competition in a typical SAN environment, and it makes far greater use of cheaper larger SATA disks while maintaining the demanding storage performance levels of critical enterprise applications. Customers using this technology are currently making savings of up to 90% in some cases on power and cooling costs within their storage environment. Combine this with a solution that is so simple to use that 98% of customers only need to spend 3-4 hours per week on SAN administration, and you have a very convincing solution for an organisation’s SAN requirements. So much so, that the 2 biggest players in the virtualisation market, VMware and Microsoft have both awarded it the number 1 storage solution to use with their virtualisation software. Origina have built their ‘Green storage’ offering in conjunction with Compellent (www.compellent.com) to offer Irish organisations the most cutting edge environmentally friendly storage solution available in the market today. Deploying a virtual data centre creates savings for Origina customers well beyond disk costs by helping them make the most of their current data centre resources and shrinking their data centre footprint, enabling them to reduce expansion costs from generators, power infrastructure, cooling and facility limitations. Compellent’s Enterprise Manager Storage Resource management (SRM) software arms storage administrators with the carbon and power information they need to help find the ideal mix of disks for their data centre and save on unnecessary upgrades. The software’s Green Report is a powerful tool for IT strategy that automatically calculates energy costs and CO2 emissions into actual euro amounts.
Background to the AwardOrigina’s Innovation & Development DepartmentOrigina’s in-house Innovation & Development team work with the primary goal of developing new and exciting solutions which are ultimately aimed at reinforcing the company’s core mission of: reducing costs, reducing risks & making IT more flexible for our customers. This relatively new department within Origina seeks to develop new and creative solutions. Led by Rowan O’Donoghue this team also focuses on the latest & most innovative product and service offerings from domestic and international organisations with a view to bringing such new solutions to their customer’s either via strategic partnership or licensing agreements. Ever conscious of the escalating costs our customers are facing which are compounded by the budgetary constraints almost every IT professional has to bare, our Innovation & Development team are investing over 80% of their resources in ‘Green Solutions’. Incredibly IT accounts for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions, creating as much harmful toxins as the airline industry. According to Forrester Research for every €1 spent on powering IT systems, 50c is spent on simply cooling the technology itself. Forrester have also found that investing in ‘Green’ solutions are in the top three objectives of senior IT managers worldwide and an overwhelming majority have cited this as a necessary route to saving money not just the planet. Within any given IT infrastructure there will typically be dedicated server infrastructure which in turn has its own storage environment. These environments are highly technical and in themselves present a wealth of challenges for IT managers including:
Green StorageAs stated above, data growth and the legal requirement to keep data stored for several years is one of the biggest problems facing the Irish & international IT industries today. Until now, simple problems such as the daily administration of a storage infrastructure, allocation of storage space itself and the powering and cooling of these environments were not by any means of paramount importance to senior IT management. Today this has all changed. Origina have found in recent years, that our customers are indeed struggling with maintaining their storage infrastructures to the point where this has been hindering their operational capacity. The typical problems being faced were the complexity in managing their storage environments, the issue of SAN infrastructures going end of life and customers being forced to complete “forklift” upgrades and the increasing cost of data centre space and power and cooling. In 2007 Origina’s Innovation & Development team began researching data storage solutions from the world’s leading suppliers as well as emerging vendors with a view to providing a fresh answer to our customer’s storage problems. Companies that were included as part of this research included: EMC, Hitachi, IBM, HP, NetApp, Pillar, 3PAR, Isilon, Lefthand Networks, Copan and many more. After lengthy exploration and talks with many international companies, one company truly stood out from the rest - Compellent. Compellent TechnologiesCompellent have developed cutting-edge storage solutions that are designed to significantly lower storage and infrastructure capital expenditures, reduce the skill level and number of personnel required to manage information and enable continuous data availability and storage virtualisation.Unlike traditional storage vendors, Compellent's approach is to actually sell you less disk storage, while at the same time helping you manage your current data footprint.
This micro-level virtualisation helps organisation’s access their data faster by spreading operations across all disk drives in the SAN, making it possible to process multiple data requests at the same time. Compellent’s Thin Provisioning feature radically reduces the number of disks IT departments purchase. Unlike other storage providers that require up-front purchases of best-guess disk needs, the Compellent SAN only consumes disk space when data is actually written to it. As a result, companies with the Compellent SAN use significantly less power and cooling & require less storage, without sacrificing performance. Purchasing fewer drives in advance is only part of the story. Origina’s virtual data centre solution also includes Compellent’s Automated Tiered Storage to help IT professionals reduce the impact of the average 80 percent of data on their system that is considered inactive.
Server Virtualisation Thrives with Storage VirtualisationOrigina also helps customers virtualise their server environment using VMware technology. Compellent’s unique Dynamic Block Architecture and seamless integration with VMware enable storage administrators to amplify the benefits of server virtualisation by allowing them to provision from a virtual pool of storage without restrictions and create storage for hundreds of virtual servers quickly with no wasted storage capacity. Compellent’s Boot from SAN technology can help administrators save up to €50,000 for every 25 servers they boot from the SAN and help eliminate the power draw and cost of internal server disk drives without server-based software or third-party applications. With an expected exponential growth of business data continuing for the unforeseen future and the steady rise of energy concerns, eliminating wasted energy in the data centre through virtualisation is a ripe opportunity to make a real impact on the bottom line.
"Green IT Initiative of the Year 2009" - HSE – Western RegionBackgroundGalway University Hospitals (GUH), made up of University Hospital Galway and Merlin Park University Hospital Galway, provide secondary, regional and supra-regional services for the Health Service Executive - West. It is one of the major academic teaching hospitals in Ireland. GUH provide a comprehensive range of services to emergency and elective patients on an Inpatient, Day Care and Out Patient basis across the two sites. It is a regional centre for a wide range of specialties. It is also a supra-regional centre in respect of Cardiology and Cancer Services. The organisation’s IT requirements are vast and spread across the various departments and hospital sections. Over the last number of years the IT team have embraced virtualisation technologies and most systems now sit in a virtual environment which allows the IT department a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to day to day server administration and provisioning. Storage ProblemsWith the new virtualised server infrastructure in place, the IT team could provision new environments for the various applications running in the hospital in a very simple and efficient manner. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the storage environment as there was an ongoing issue of departments being unable to accurately estimate the storage for their systems. This resulted in LUN’s being allocated and over time some were massively underutilised, meaning a waste of disk and others were hitting capacity meaning complex out of hours storage re-provisioning work needed to be completed. By June of 2008 storage levels were at a critical level for UCHG and they were on the verge of running out of storage and were close to capacity on the model of SAN they currently had. These problems were compounded further by the fact that their existing SAN was also past the end of its product life and could not be upgraded their only option was to buy a new one. Their existing SAN vendor was happy to sell them a new SAN but there was no way of avoiding the same problems again over the next 3 years. Solution & BenefitsThrough working with Origina’s Innovation & Development team UCHG devised a pioneering new storage framework for the entire organisation. Origina storage architects designed a solution built on Compellent Storage technologies that delivered a vast variety of benefits that solved the organisation’s current storage problems and moreover facilitated their requirements into the future. This solution provided the following benefits:
Previous ICT Excellence AwardsFor further details on the 2007 & 2008 "Project of the Year" ICT Excellence awards, click on the links below.
EFS (Société Générale Securities Services) - High Availability & Disaster Recovery Solution
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